Earner Diary- Learn How To Earn

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A while back it occurred to me that I had quite a few (over 100) parked domains that I had done nothing with! They were just sitting there, collecting dust and advertising for the domain company should you type a name in. This got me to researching how to make money with parked domains. What I learned is that if you have a lot of domains, those domains can be another source of income for you. And if you’ve followed me any at all, you know I’m all about extra streams of income!

After a few months, my research has taught me several things. One is that no matter what, to make good honest money at anything online, it takes some patience and effort. Finding ways to make money with parked domains is no different. I tried several methods to make money with my parked domains and I’ll share some of my findings with you below. Let me just say this though, if you’re expecting a story about how I made a killing with parked domains, you’d better go read something else!

To be honest, the only people I’ve ever heard of, or know of, who are making a lot of money with parked domains are those who have thousands of domains. These are your domain brokers and domain speculators. I don’t know of anyone with a few hundred domains who are making huge profits. But then again, the whole notion behind a parked domain is that the only traffic it gets is type in traffic, so unless you have a few super popular domains that are one or two word keywords, you’re not going to get the traffic that you need to bring in huge amounts of dollars!

So, here’s my findings over several months.

If you have an Google Adsense account, then you have access to this feature from Google. Basically what happens is whenever someone types in your domain name, for example; example.com, and comes to your site, you’ll get a small amount of money if they click on one of the ads on that site. These ads are very similar to Adsense ads (afterall, it is Adsense we’re talking about!).

I moved 10 domains over to Adsense for domains to see how well they’d do. I didn’t know what to expect, but I didn’t expect much. And it’s a good thing, I hardly made any money at all. But after all, they are just domain names with no content so I shouldn’t have been that surprised!

Chances are at some time or another you’ve typed in a domain name into the address bar of your browser and got a generic page with a bunch of ads on it. Maybe you misspelled the name or you thought the domain you wanted was adsenses.com rather than adsense.com. Whatever the reason, the generic page you see with all the ads are generally hosted by a Domain Parking Site.

In a nutshell, here’s how most domain parking sites work. You transfer your domain dns to their servers. This is generally really easy to do and most web hosting companies have a feature on their hosting dashboards to make this easy. If they don’t, you need a new host or some written instructions!

There is usually no charge for you to transfer your domain’s DNS to their server. I would be suspicious of any company who wanted to charge you to do that. These companies usually make money by putting ads up on the generic pages that pop up when someone types in your domain name. Most of these domain parking sites keyword target their sites so you have a good chance whenever someone clicks on an ad.

Don’t try and pin down any of these sites as to how much they’ll pay you per click. The price varies by how much the advertiser pays for the ads and how much of those dollars the domain parking company wants to keep.

Again, I transferred a little over 10 domains to one domain parking site to see how well they would work.

All I can say is that they paid just about as much as the Adsense for Domains did. I didn’t make enough money to get my blood pressure up, but again, the only way most people get traffic to a domain without a website is if someone just types it into a browser.

Probably my favorite way to make money with parked domains is using affiliate programs. But the downside is it takes a lot more work!

For starters, there are two ways you can go about this.

Method number one involves getting a blog hosting account. One where you can host unlimited number of domains! Like I said above, this take some work but it can pay off a lot better than the other two methods.

Then you create a mini site. You add a page or two of content that is keyword targeted to whatever your domain is. You’ll also want to add a privacy, contact and about page to make the search engines happy (you know, just in case one of them may actually rank your site)

You’ll then find an affiliate programs that is in the same niche as your domain name. For example, if your domain is rustyoldbottlecaps.com, then you’d want an affiliate that is about rusty old bottle caps! Don’t try and feminine products to people who are looking for rusty old bottle caps, that’s affiliate marketing 101!

You can promote this mini sites the same way you promote any other site, but the whole point is that these domains are ones you don’t have time to fool with, so you throw up some content and affiliate ads and forget them.

Method number two can be easy or hard depending on your host. Some host allow redirects, others don’t. Some make it easy, most don’t! (this is also called ‘domain forwarding’ by some companies)

The thing here is that you’ll redirect (or forward) the domain to a site that closely resembles the redirected domain so your traffic is targeted. If you have a parked domain like rustyoldbottlecaps.com, you wouldn’t point it at a site about online dating. However, perhaps you have a site about antiques and that site has an affiliate program that you’re making a few bucks off of. You may do yourself a favor by having your type in traffic from rustyoldbottlecaps.com domain redirected to your antique website!

At the end of the day, I didn’t make a killing with any one method, however creating a mini site with affiliate links did end up making me the most money. But it does take a lot more time, which is why these domains were sitting in the first place, I just didn’t have time to build on them! Obviously if you have thousands, or even a few hundred domains, the mini site method won’t work for you unless your a mini site creating monster!

So what I did was to plan to take a few hours each week and work on putting up a mini site or two on each domain.

These are just a few ways to make money with parked domains. There are others, but I’d say these three ways are most popular.

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I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Niche websites and blogs are where the money is at in Internet Marketing and Affiliate Marketing, especially on a local level. Out of all the emails I get asking me for help, this one subject is probably the most asked about. I simply don’t have time to answer all the questions. I’ve covered a lot of the subjects and strategies on this blog, but there is more some of you need to know to get started making money with niche sites.

Having said that, a while back I bought The Keyword Crash Course. This is a course that Mark Butler and Courtney Tuttle have developed. The whole course was about starting Niche sites, monetizing them and getting free traffic from search egnines like Google. Although I was sure I knew 99% of the stuff they were going to teach (afterall, I make a good income from this stuff already!), I was hoping to learn a few tricks that would make me more money or save me time. I wasn’t disappointed in the course. In fact, I felt like the Course paid for itself within the first 30 minutes of watching the first video. By the way, the course cost $597. I’ve spent a lot more on courses that didn’t have near the amount of information in them.

If you know Court and Mark, then you know that they are honest and helpful. In fact, they’re some of the most honest and helpful people I’ve ever met on the Internet. Everything is laid out for you and they don’t hold anything back. (unlike a lot of courses I’ve bought!) In fact, I’ll go as far as saying the Keyword Crash Course is the most legitimate and easy to follow course I’ve bought. It’s a nuts and bolts Course that nearly anyone can follow and make money with. You can take a look at it by clicking here.

Within the first 30 minutes of the first video, Court describes how to find profitable keywords using “The Formula“. This was the bombshell that I had been looking for. Every once in a while, something will come along that makes you set back and take a deep breath, all the while thinking “Damn, this is what I’ve been searching for!” That is how I felt when Court showed me The Formula for evaluating profitable keywords.

I’ll tell you this also, when you start finding those little Gold nuggets of Keywords, it won’t take you long to figure out that you can use them to build Affiliate Sites rather than Adsense sites if that is what you want to do. If more people would use The Formula, there would be a lot less people failing at this game.

Before this, I had my own system for finding good Keywords, but it was hit and miss. Some keywords paid very well, while others fizzled. I still get some keywords that don’t pay when I use The Formula, but a lot less. By using Court’s Formula, I’ve been able to amass about 90 keywords that will turn into some very nice Niche sites.

Now Court and Mark have opened up the site to the Public and you can see everthing in the original Course for only $1 (yeah, the same Course I paid $597 for!)

Whether you’re a beginner just starting out, or an advanced marketer, The Keyword Crash Course has something for you.

What You’ll Get For $1

You’ll be able to see the original course including the 10 training video’s. These video’s will take you step by step and show you how to pick profitable keywords for your niche site (using The Formula), setting WordPress, how and where to find backlinks, how to obtain content for your niche sites and how to set up Adsense and other advertising to make money from your sites.

Plus there is a little video at the end that will show you how to flip your new sites for Money. I found this one to be very interesting and something I may try down the road.

Court and Mark feel that once you’ve seen the quality of the training material, you’ll want to subscribe to their monthly service where they’ll be bringing you more information about building and ranking websites, live Webinars and live Q&A sessions. This subscription is $29 per month and totally optional. You can sign up for $1, get all the information that was in the original course for $597 and forget about the rest if you want to. They’re fine with that. They only want people who are serious about making money online.

People, if I could stear you to another course that I thought was better, one that taught you how to make money online with Niche sites, I would. But there is simply nothing out there as thorough and easy to follow that Court and Mark’s Keyword Crash Course. If you’re serious about learning how to make money online, this is one course you need to take. If after the course, you can’t make money online, then this business is probably not for you. That’s how good I believe this course is. And for only $1, you sure as hell won’t find a better bargain. Click here if you want to learn more and take advantage of this opportunity.

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Okay, this is the moment some of you have been waiting for! The results of my Make Money Online Janurary $2500 Challenge. If you read my previous post, then you know I got off to a late start. In fact, I only had a little under two weeks to work on this project, but I attacked it anyway knowing I’d probably come up short. Which I did. Here are the details.

If you read the mid-month Challenge update, you know up to that point I had made only approximately $200. So I’ll pick up from there.

Since I was really strapped for time, I had to change the way I would try and reach $2500 in two weeks. What I finally decided on was to build two simple WordPress blogs and 2 Blogger blogs.

I then searched for two different products or service affiliate programs that I could make anywhere from $9 or more from each sale. I chose products in the Health Care and Pets niches. My other offers were in the $20 to $35 range.

One thing you want to keep in mind when choosing an affiliate products is whether or not it has appeal to people who are desperate for solutions. The more desperate, the better the product. For example, Gamblers and Smokers are two desperate groups of people. One group wants to learn quick tips for making money with Gambling, the other wants to learn how to stop smoking. Addicts are a great group of people to target.

I started building a Network of profiles on Social Media sites. I’m not a big fan of Social Media, but for this system, I needed some eyeballs on my offers and I needed them quick! So I made multiple profiles on places like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo Answers and others. For example, for this Challenge, I made 17 MySpace profiles and 8 Yahoo profiles.

In order for all your profiles to be effectice, they have to look like real profiles. If you get lazy and create a bunch of spammy profiles, you’ll get them banned very quickly.

Another thing I did (which proved to be the most profitable) was find 8 forums that were relevant for my Health Care offer and 5 forums that were relevant for my Pet care offer. Again, I made a profile on each forums and made it look good. This takes time but will pay off if you don’t get greedy and try to spam the forums.

To be effective, once again your blogs need to look legitimate. So I set up each WordPress blog with 5 to 7 pages of Content, an About page along with Privacy and TOS pages. I did the same with my Blogger blogs.

The only two plugins I used with the WordPress blogs were Redirection (this is an important one) and All In One SEO pack.

I didn’t worry about getting them indexed quickly. They wouldn’t be live long enough to bring in the organic traffic I needed to make these offers pay off. I needed them as Sales pages to divert traffic to so I could pitch them my offers.

On each WordPress blog, I used the main index page as my landing/sales page and all the additional content pages were redirected to my affiliate link to the Merchants. The important thing here is that these index pages looked like normal blog post, not those long spammy looking sales page most of us are used to seeing. Each sales/landing page was written like a review or as a product info page. You just need to make it irresistible for them to go and sign up once they’ve finished reading it!

Since I was strapped for time, I started pushing the offers before I had all my networks set up. I normally would have cultivated those profiles for a few weeks or months before using the links. But I just didn’t have to time so I had to do the best I could.

I can’t stress enough how important it is to make your Profiles and your post look normal and not spammy. If you don’t know how to write a good blog or forum post recommending a product and not make it look spammy, then go to your favorite forums and start reading. If you’ve been in this business long enough, you’ll soon be able to spot the spammers from the regular posters.

Another area where some of you get hung up at is the nofollow vs do follow links on some Social Media sites and forums. It doesn’t matter! You’re looking for traffic here, not backlinks that push link juice to your sites. Leave links to your blogs everywhere you can without making them look spammy and forget about whether or not they pass PR.

My most profitable avenues for income were from the Forums and Yahoo Answers.

My conversion rate on the Health Care product was around 4 percent and my conversion rates for the Pet Care products ranged from 3 to 6 percent. The highest converting of these was one Forum and Yahoo Answers.

I ended the month earning $562 for the Health Care products from Forums and Yahoo Answers and $157 from other Social Media.

For my Pet Care products, I ended the month at $781 from Forums and Yahoo Answers traffic and $117 from other Social Media.

The grand total of these came out to be $1617. When you add the $200.43 I had already made, the total for the month comes out to be $1817.43. About $700 short of my goal but pretty darn good in the small amount of time I had to make it.

Once again I have to tell you that in those last two weeks, I spent an enormous amount of time making this money. I worked from 2 to 4 hours in the evenings and a lot of weekend time.

Although you can make money with this system, I wouldn’t advise it for long term income. It’s just too tedious and time consuming for me. For the amount of time I spent on this project, I could have set up 6 blogs, wrote content for each and started building backlinks to them for long term growth and income.

I’ve said it before and I’ll repeat it here. Social Media doesn’t convert well. The reason I believe is because these people are not looking to buy anything. They are also Internet Savvy. In order for your affiliate programs to do well, you really need to target people who are looking to buy what you have to sell. Simple technique but one that many people fail to implement. That’s the real secret to making money on the Internet!

The reason the Forums and Yahoo Answers did so well is because I targeted my post to people looking for what I had to sell.

Another important thing to remember is not to spam the Forums or Yahoo Answers. For every post I put a link in, I had made around 10 to 15 helpful and informative post without a link in them. Many of you get greedy or impatient and use short, spammy comments to leave a link in and then wonder why you get banned or or links removed. You have to make your profiles and comments look real!

With this Challenge, I only had 4 MySpace profiles banned. Which is very good considering the time I had.

As promised, I’ve decided to give something away for the followers of this Challenge. Even though I built several Squidoo lenses, I’ll be keeping those for further use. I can’t stress enough how important it is to build good Squidoo lenses for making money and backlinks. The best resource I’ve found for building high quality Squidoo lenses is an ebook from Tiffany Dow titled “Flip That Lens“.

What I decided to give away to 3 readers is 3 of my domains. These don’t have sites on them and you’ll have to be registered with NameCheap in order to get them. It’s free to sign up for an account at NameCheap, so 3 of you can expect emails from me in the next few days. If you haven’t signed up for a free account at NameCheap, you might want to do it now.

For now, I’ve got to get back to my sites that make me money. The way I earn money online is by building sites and getting them ranked in the Search Engines. Once built and ranked, these sites are pretty much hands off except for building links to them and adding content once a month or so. This is long term work and I don’t expect to make money with any of these sites for at least 6 months and most likely a year or more. Many people don’t have the patience to make sites like these! I love free targeted search engine traffic!

If you decide to try the system I used, take your time doing it. Don’t get impatient and spend some time building believable profiles. Add pictures (you can get them at Istockphoto.com) and other stuff that real users add to their profiles. Don’t spam other people. Build friends slowly and don’t blast them with alerts.

Now you know that it is possible to make decent money in a short amount of time. The question is, do you have the will power it takes to spend the time and effort doing it!?

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Next to “How do I get started making money online“, most beginners ask “Should I put adsense ads on same page as Affiliate ads?” It seems that a common misconception of beginners is that the more ads you have on a page, the more money you will make. I guess I can see that logic, but I’m about to tell you why that is a bad idea! Follow along as I explain why you need to pick just one monetization method. I’ve come to this conclusion after many years in the affiliate marketing business and by doing many test to see which made me the most money.

Okay, like I said above, I can understand how you might think that having as many ads as possible on a page is a good idea. Heck, the Internet is full of websites with more ads on a single page than content. But generally those websites do not make any money.

Reason #1 Why You Shouldn’t Mix adsense ads with affiliate ads. As many website owners are finding out, having too many ads (in the eyes of Google) post Panda is a bad idea. As of late, Google has been penalizing websites with a lot of ads above the fold. This goes for Adsense ads as well as Affiliate ads. If for no other reason than this, you should limit the ads you have above the fold. I generally only put one, but have been known to put two if the width of the web page allows it. I like a lot of white space around my ads. My tests have proved that I make money with Adsense in a greater amount when I isolate the Adsense block.

Reason #2 Why It’s Not A Good Idea To Put Adsense Ads on an Affiliate site. Time and time again studies have shown that web users get ad blindness very quickly. Bombing your customer with a plethora of ads just makes them ignore all of them. Not only that, but it makes your site look spammy. By limiting the amount of ads you have on a page, you are making the customer focus on one ad. Whether that ad is an Adsense ad or an affiliate ad. Plus, even with those that aren’t ad blind, too many ads confuses most people and they end up hitting the back button.

Reason #3 Why You Should Never Put Adsense Ads On The Same Website As Affiliate Ads. Because you lose money. That should be the biggest reason of all not to mix the two monetization methods. Even if you’re lucky enough to have found a niche paying $1 to $5 per click, most generally Adsense pays less than Affiliate offers. You may get that sweet $5 Adsense click every once in a while, but are you missing out on a $50 commission by sending your customer off to another website? That has been my experience when I tested the same sites over a period of time. In nearly all cases, my affiliate income fell dramatically whenever I added Adsense. What’s more, the additional Adsense income did not make up the difference! Reason enough to pick one monetization method and stick with it. Actually you should be doing your own testing to see which pays more, Adsense or affiliate income.

The Golden Rule of Affiliate Marketing is make it easy for your Customer to buy from you. If you have pages with more than 40% ads, you’re confusing your customers. Don’t further complicate the situation and lose money in the process by sticking some Adsense ads up hoping that you’ll get the people who didn’t jump on your Affiliate link to click on your Adsense link. It doesn’t work that way!

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If you’re reading this, chances are you’re looking for ways to make money now. I know. DUH! Otherwise you’re just bored and want to kill some time while at work! But for the sake of this article, I’m assuming you need a few extra dollars, or a bunch of extra dollars. Here are 5 ways people can start making money quickly. I have other article on this site regarding quick ways to make money, a few are the same ones only updated while a few are different and will work if you do! I’ll also prerequisite this by saying that you’ll have to dedicate some time and effort in order to get these or any other method to work for you. So if you think these are going to be easy money making methods, they’re not! So let’s get started!

Yeah, I know you’ve heard that before. But even though Ebay (www.ebay.com) is not as individual friendly as it once was, it’s still a great way for the Average Joe or Jane to make money quick. I’m still amazed at what people will sell on Ebay and what other people will buy! Not only that, but you can start offering a service to your local community to sell their stuff. They just agree to pay the listing fees and your commission. Generally most people who list items for others get around 10 to 15 percent of the final auction price.

You could expand on this service by agreeing to list items on Craigslist or Etsy, but there’ll be a lot more effort in this. On a Craigslist listing, someone will have to communicate with potential buyers and arrange for the transaction.

Yes Virginia, there are legitimate companies who will pay you to take real surveys. There are also companies that will pay you to read and sift through a mound of email that comes into a company. One of the leading companies that will pay you to do these things is Send Earnings (click here to visit their site). The way this works is large corporations want to know which products have a good chance of making them money on the market. You’ve heard of consumer groups? These are groups of consumers who evaluate products before they hit the market. Some get paid cash to perform these evaluations, some get the merchandise they’re evaluating, which can be sold for cash!

Many of these same corporations also get a huge volume of email each day. Can you imagine the volume of email companies like Wal-Mart, Taget or Sears must get every day? They don’t want to pay a full time employee (or more likely a group of EMPLOYEES) to sift through that mountain of email and pick out which are legitimate and which ones are junk. It’s cheaper to hire a company like Send Earnings to do it for them. This is where you come in!

If you like talking on the phone and dealing with people’s problems, then being a Customer Service Agent may be right up your alley. A company called Working Solutions (www.workingsolutions.com), hires people to become service reps. You’ll need an up-to-date computer, a high speed Internet connection and a land line telephone to get started. You’ll have to fill out an application on their website and wait for approval. Just beware, if you’ve never worked customer service, ask someone who has and they’ll tell you to get a thick skin! If you haven’t learned anything from the Internet yet, you’ll soon discover people are a lot “braver” over the phone than they are in a face to face situation. Prepare to get an ear full from some people wanting to vent. On the other hand, you’ll genuinely be helping other people who appreciate your help.

Every project that you’ll be working will pay differently. Some projects will pay only while you’re talking, some will pay per phone call, etc. You get the picture. Working Solutions website says that some agents average between $7.50 and $30 per hour depending on the project.

I guess it’s possible you’ve been living under a rock for the last few years, but if you haven’t then you’ve probably heard about Fiverr (www.fiverr.com). You may have even went there and wasted lots of time checking out the gigs and getting a laugh out of them. But if you’re needing money, have you thought about actually signing up and becoming a vendor? Don’t think you have nothing to offer. After all, just take a look at what some people are doing for $5!

Five dollars may not sound like a lot of money, but it can add up really quick for the right gig. The most successful people on Fiverr seem to have multiple gigs. I’ve seen some with thousands of feedback ratings. Realizing that some people don’t go to the trouble of giving feedback, you’ll quickly come to the conclusion that I did, that these people are making a pretty good pile of cash! Five bucks at a time. Okay, so you don’t get the whole five bucks. I think it comes out to somewhere in the 3 to 3.50 range. Still, it’s money and it can add up quickly if you have multiple gigs that are popular!

Okay, I honestly only put this one here for something different you may not have seen before. I personally wouldn’t sign up for a medical trail because being human guinea pig doesn’t sound like something I want to do. But I know others have no problem doing this. That’s okay with me, afterall, it’s your body! I’ve seen some data suggesting that some trials can pay up to $250 per day. Obviously there are conditions to be met with each trail. If this sounds like something that interest you, then check out Paid Clinical Trials (www.paidclinicaltrials.org). Just be aware that there could be some serious side effects by taking part in these trials!

I’m betting these aren’t the get rich quick schemes you thought they would be are they? The fact is, you can make money in a short amount of time with any of these methods. Obviously there are other methods that you can use to make money quick, these are just 5 I thought might help you. So what are you waiting for!

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By the time you read this, there’s a good chance that PostRunner V2 will have been released. PostRunner is/was a feature for the members of The Keyword Academy (here’s the Keyword Academy Review). You logged into a dashboard, wrote articles and picked from a list of websites where you wanted your article to be published. The owner of that blogged then decided whether or not to accept your article. Why did members post to Post Runner? Because every article was allowed to have a backlink pointing to their website. Over the years the quality of these sites really became poor. Website owners wouldn’t approve or decline articles and even if they did, some would remove the links in the future (which is against the TOS of PostRunner). Some would simply remove your article if it started ranking and replace it with a spun copy without your links. It was no big surprise that the quality suffered and people left in droves.

So the folks over at The Keyword Academy has been working hard to rectify all of these problems and make PostRunner a more powerful and easier to use system. Although there is no definite launch date, it’s suspected to launch in a few days from the time of this writing. Why is this important? Because unlike before when PostRunner was free, there’ll be a charge to use it. However, if you’re already a member of The Keyword Academy, you’ll have FREE access to PostRunner V2.

One of the biggest differences is that they’ve changed how it works. Now it has evolved into more of a Guest Posting system. What this means is you’ll write the article on the subject of your expertise. The website owner will be able to look at the article and decide whether or not he wants to accept it for his website or not. That part is a lot like the old PostRunner, but where it changes is this. Both the Website owner and the Authors will have an opportunity to grade each other. If you’re a website owner and don’t want to accept poor articles, then you set your limits and the system will take care of the rest.

In a nutshell, the new PostRunner is a middle man between Website owners looking for quality content and site owners looking to promote their website through writing high quality articles in exchange for a link back to their sites. It’s a Guest Posting system on steroids!

Other Changes to PostRunner Version 2 are;

Site owners will be able to set requirements as to the quality of the articles they accept. If you only want to accept 500 word articles with one link, no problem, you can set it up that way. It’s very customizable and it allows site owners more say-so in the articles they accept.Site owners will now be able to give Authors a score. So in the future, if you don’t want to accept articles from an Author with a low score, you can do that in a flash! You can set the limit wherever you want it and if the Author doesn’t have a high enough score, they’ll not be able to post to your website! Cool huh!On the other hand, sites can be ranked now. As an author, if you don’t want your article on a low quality site, you’ll be able to look and see how others ranked this site.Probably one of the most important features is that an Author will be able to immediately see the Page Rank of a site and other stats like how many times they’ve ignored articles and how many times they’ve accepted/denied articles. This is one thing that was needed with the old system so much!

It’s no secret that Guest Posting has been hot in the last year or so. Especially now that Google has destroyed many of the big backlink networks like Build My Rank, SEOLinkvine, SEOCobra and others. Guest Posting is a legitimate White Hat way to get quality backlinks back to your site from White Hat sites. It’s been one of the least talked about, but most effective ways to get higher rankings for quite some time now.

If you’re already a member of the Keyword Academy, then you already know all of this. If not, and you’ve been thinking about taking advantage of a Keyword Academy membership, now is the time to act! If you wait until after the PostRunner V2 launch, you’ll have to pay for it. If you join before they launch, you’ll be able to take advantage of all the other benefits of The Keyword Academy as well as access to V2 of PostRunner!

Here’s what non-members will have to pay to join PostRunner V2 after the launch.

- Up to 10 sites will cost you $30 per month

- Up to 25 sites will cost you $50 per month

- Up to 50 sites will cost you $75 per month

-Unlimited Number of sites will cost you $199 per month

But if you’re a member before they launch around the 16th of April, you’ll be automatically grandfathered and won’t have to pay anything!

Click Here to Join the Keyword Academy NOW and get in before they launch PostRunner V2!!

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I’ll guess that most of you know what a smackdown is. Well, I’ve decided to put some popular article submission sites in head to head review. I guess you could call it a article marketing Battle Royale. I get a lot of questions from readers wanting to know which is the best article submission site out there.

I know many of you use article marketing as a means to brand your blogs and websites and to drive traffic to them. That’s cool, I do for some of my blogs and websites also. Article marketing is a very good way to get the word out about your product or service.

The problem for many blog and website owners is deciding on which article submission site or service to use. There are many article submission sites on the Internet today. For the purpose of this head-to-head review, I’m choosing the most popular article submission sites that I know of. Some are free and several are paid. I have either used these services in the past and/or I currently use them. The article submission websites are Ezinearticles, iSnare, GoArticles, Article Marketer, Article Marketing Automation and Unique Article Wizard.

To judge the Smackdown, I wrote an original article for a specific website of mine. I made it unique for each article submission site (as best as I could, each site has it’s own rules). I then submitted the article to each submission service and I’ve been waiting on the outcome for a few weeks. I believe enough results have come in now to bring this Smackdown to an end.

Unique Article Wizard

I’ve been using Unique Article Wizard (UAW) for about 6 months now.

I’m here to tell you that this has been a very good investment for me. I simply love UAW!

UAW’s is a very unique service. Due to the non-disclosure letter you have to sign when joining, I can’t go into details about how UAW works, just trust me when I say it will bring in a lot of one way links to your sites by distributing unique article to blogs, websites and directories. This service has been the fastest way to build legitimate one way back links that I’ve found, bar none!

But that’s not all. Unique Article Wizard also has another very powerful feature in that it can make each of your resource boxes unique as well. It’s possible to add links to many websites with just one article.

You can also choose how many times your article is distributed each day. You can have it blasted out to all the places at once or choose your own number. I like to “drip” my articles out as I think having a bunch of backlinks show up at once is not good for a site. Especially small sites. So I “drip” my articles out by choosing to have them submitted at a rate of about 20 to 30 per day.

After your article has been distributed, you can check to see the actual number of sites and email subscribers where your article was submitted to. You find this button in your dashboard in the column next to your article title. Neat stuff.

Now, the article I submitted to was distributed to 543 websites and directories and 71 email subscribers. Out of that number, I can track about 107 backlinks (as of this writing, I expect this number to increase over time) I received to the website I had listed in my resource boxes. That’s a pretty high number! (I’ve actually had some articles do better than that!)

The cool thing is, as people find these articles, they’ll use them and I’ll still be getting backlinks long after the submission is over with.

Another benefit that isn’t advertised is this. Hit the page reload button on your browser when you’re viewing your article on UAW and you’ll see a completely new article every time your refresh (again, I can’t tell you how they do this, but it is very powerful). It’s awesome. I then will take one of these unique articles and submit it to the free article submission sites. I’ve also submitted them to Article Marketer to have them submitted. If you have blogs or websites in the same niche, you could use one of these unique articles that UAW makes as content on your site.

Click here to learn more about Unique Article Marketing.

Article Marketing Automation (AMA)

I’ll be honest and tell you that I passed Article Marketing Automation the first time I heard about it. I wasn’t impressed with the advertising or the $47 per month price tag. Besides, I was already using UAW and figured that this service couldn’t be any better. Plus they used the words “spin” and “spun” in their advertising and that sounded cheap to me. I had visions of my sentences looking like “Affiliate marketing rolls down ice cubes after desert” or some other crap like that.

Thankfully, I was wrong.

But about two months ago an Internet Marketer who I trust told me I should be using AMA. He told me it was as powerful as UAW and had some other cool features that UAW didn’t.

So I signed up, figuring “What the hell, I’ll cancel if I don’t like it“.

Do I think that AMA is as good or better than UAW? No. But it’s close, damn close!

What I like about AMA is that its network is only made up of websites and blogs, not directories. Also, my favorite feature is that you can add up to 3 links to the body of the content. There is no resource box! All links go into the body. In my opinion, these anchored links will pass more authority when in the body of the article than a resource box. (some site owners either remove the resource box or nofollow the links in resource boxes when using other article submission services)

Here’s a big tip for you. Whether it’s an article you’re submitting or whether it’s your own site, put the links as near to the top as you can get. Google figures they must be important if you put them near the top and you’ll get more weight passed on to your site or to an interior page if the link happens to be on your site.

What I don’t like about AMA is that their network seems pretty small. They advertise 2000 sites, but I haven’t seen near that many. Of course, I know that my articles don’t go out to all of them, but the best I’ve seen is a few hundred. Word has it that they’re continually building their network, so that is the good news. Since they’re fairly new, it may take a little while longer for them to get to the size that some of the others are.

But, since the links are in the content instead of at the bottom of the page in a resource box, the backlinks I am getting are passing more weight to my sites. It’s probably only a small difference, but I’ll take all the help I can get!

The article I submitted to AMA has been published 77 times (as of this writing) and three quarters of those articles have been indexed by Google so far. Not bad!

If the level of service, both Customer service and the level of article submission, continues to grow, I see great things happening with Article Marketing Automation. Right now, I think it’s well worth the money. You can spend a lot more and get a helluva lot less with some of the other article submission services out there! This one is a keeper in my book! If they’re like any other Internet services, once they start growing, they will continue to raise the price, so you’d better get in quick if you want to lock in at a low price. Click here to learn more about Article Marketing Automation.

Ezinearticles

Ezinearticles has been around a while. In fact, I believe they were one of the first article directories. At least as best as I can remember. If any of you have read my previous post about Ezinearticles, then you know others as well as myself have had some problems with them over the years getting articles accepted. Looking back, I think this started in earnest whenever they started their “Premium” paid service. I don’t know if it was coincidence or not.

They offer both a free submission service and a $97 per month “Premium” service. I looked over the “features” of the premium service and to be honest, I don’t see the benefit. Certainly not $97 per month worth! There are too many other services that offer better service and more features for less than $97 per month IMHO.

But back to the smackdown.

I submitted the article about 3 weeks ago. It took several days for the article to be accepted. I have noticed over about the last month or so that my articles were being accepted faster. I don’t know why, I just know the last few times I’ve used them it has went off without a hitch.

Anyway, the article has been viewed 232 times and published 16 times as of the writing of this post.

Ezinearticle doesn’t tell you where they submitted the articles to or which sites have accepted your article. But judging from my WordPress dashboard, this article has sent me 19 backlinks to a site of mine. Looking through my sites, I found 8 visitors who came to my site through that article and my EZA dashboard said I’ve had 9 URL clicks. Not great, but better than nothing, especially on the backlinks.

GoArticles

GoArticles is a free submission site. Being free, the features are limited as to the stats you’ll get from your articles. The article I submitted has received 56 request since I submitted it. Now that doesn’t tell my everyone who has used my article because any article on GoArticles can be cut and pasted without requesting it.

One thing I really like about GoArticles is that you can put links in the body of the article and they don’t get bent out of shape about it.

As for the backlinks I received from that article, a search of my stats showed that I’ve received 8 backlinks from that article. One of them on an Authority blog.

Not great results, but remember, it’s free and you can add links in the body of the article without them getting all pissy about it. Also, I’ve never had an article rejected by GoArticles. From what I can tell, you’re article is accepted very quick. Hey, it’s free, what do you have to lose!

iSnare

This is a paid to submit an article service. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that they probably don’t make much money from this site because of the poor customer service and submission time I and others have had with them. It took over two weeks for my article to be accepted and distributed. From what I can tell, I haven’t received any traffic or backlinks from that article.

For the price you have to pay iSnare, their customer service and submission time should be a helluva lot better. I personally wouldn’t use them again until they start submitting articles for free or improve their customer service. There’s just too many good article submission sites out there, both free and paid ones, to put up with the B.S. from them.

Article Marketer

Update 2010: Article Marketer ceased operations around October of 2009. I figured this would happen because of the lousy service everyone was getting and the poor performance of the submitted articles. Sure enough, I was right. This service has been replaced by two other companies, which I’m now reviewing and waiting to see what the long term performance will be (or lack of). Look for the updated review here on my site. Thanks!

I’ve been using Article Marketer for over a year now. I’ve never really been happy with their service, but at the time they were one of the best article submission sites around. They advertise that you’re article will be reviewed by the next business day (or the use to advertise that, haven’t checked recently) but that hasn’t been my experience.

Here’s what normally happens. I submit an article and generally there’s something wrong with it in their eyes. Either it doesn’t meet the 400 word requirement, the keyword density is too high or a dozen other reasons I’ve had. They kick it back to me, I fix it and resubmit it. Now I’ve lost another day.

You see, apparently the “by the next day” starts at the time of the LATEST SUBMISSION, not when you originally submitted it. So when they reject your article and you go back and fix it, the submission process starts all over. You move to the back of the line.

The problem is, I think they’re overworked and their editors look for reasons to reject your articles. I’ve had some of my articles rejected for the stupidest reasons imaginable. One of the most common is that the article does not meet their 400 word requirement. Doesn’t matter that I just pulled it off MS Word document that showed the word count at 500 words. Or that I rewrote an article from EZA that said the article had 475 words. Somehow their counting doesn’t add up.

I also like their excuse. “Most directories won’t accept an article with less than 400 words” or something to that affect. Bull! I get 250 and 300 word articles accepted at many article directories all day long.

Like I said, either their editors are snowed under or they are not native English speaking editors. I have a hunch it may be a little of both.

I once wrote an article on a classic consumer product. For the sake of this post, let’s say the article was over the Model T Ford. So in this article I’m giving the history of the Model T Ford and describing how automobiles have evolved over the years.

They rejected the article the first time due to ‘too many keywords’. So I changed it up and resubmitted it. Then it was “we don’t accept articles that are product reviews. You will have to either change the wording of the article or compare the product with two other like products”.

WTF! Who’s smoking crack over there!

So I changed the article up. Sounded really stupid without using the words Model T Ford, since it was an article over the Model T Ford (well, not over the Model T, but over a Classic product that has been in service for more than 50 years). But I hope you get the point.

That’s just a few of the problems I have with them. It’s not uncommon to take a week or more to get my articles accepted by them after jumping through all the hoops they put in your way.

Since this is a paid service, I expect a lot better Customer Service than that and way better service from their submissions. I noticed that they’ve lowered their price to $21 per month now. I wonder if those of us who are already subscribed will get a discount?

I have to be honest with you. Until their submission acceptance service and their Customer Service gets a lot better, I wouldn’t recommend them. Not at $21 per month. If this was a free service, I could handle it. But when I’m paying top dollar, I expect better service from a company.

Now, on to the submitted report. Their site says my article was submitted to 945 directories and websites. It doesn’t tell me how many accepted my article. NOTE: Just because your article is submitted to a directory or website doesn’t mean it will be accepted. The site owner has the final say. This is true with all services that I’m aware of.

Out of that 945 directories and websites, I can track 22 backlinks. The reason is because of Google’s duplicate content penalty. Since this service blast out the same article to a thousand or so directories and blogs, only a few will be indexed by Google.

Well, IMHO it’s a tie between Unique Article Wizard and Article Marketing Automation.

The Pro’s of Unique Artilce Wizard is that my articles were submitted to more directories and websites, bringing me more backlinks.

The Pro’s of using Article Marketing Automation is that each article ends up on a website or blog, not an article directory (that’s not a bad thing either, it’s still a backlink to your site!). Plus, I love how the anchored links are embedded into the content, not at the bottom of the page in a resource box. While I got fewer links with AMA, the links I did get were embedded into content on legitimate blogs and websites. This equals maximum passing of the link juice if the subjects are relevant!

Article Marketer comes in at third simply because of the amount of directories it submits too. The number of backlinks should have been greater, but they weren’t. Which tells me not all of the articles are getting indexed because all 945 articles were same with the same resource box. Other factors could have contributed to this, I don’t know. 

Another negative about Article Marketer is that they use two types of resource boxes. One that you can only type in your url, which does not become a hyperlink on the site it ends up on. The other is the traditional resource box with two links in it. I speculate that many site owners choose to use the 1st resource box that only shows your URL as text. This could also be the reason for low backlinks versus the numbers of sites the article was submitted to.

Down at fourth we have Ezinearticles. Pretty decent backlinks for a free service. If I had to pay for this service, I drop it in a heartbeat due to the lack of submissions and the backlinks it produces.

GoArticles isn’t great, but they’re free and you can put links in the body of the article as well as the resource box. That alone makes it worth my time to add my articles to GoArticles.

iSnare. I wouldn’t waste a dollar or my time on them until they get their act together. When I hear others starting to have good results with them, maybe I’ll try them again, but not any time soon!

So there you have it. The finals of the Article Marketing Smackdown. If you’re on a limited budget, then use GoArticles and Ezinearticles until you can afford either Article Marketing Automation or Unique Article Wizard. You’ll build backlinks with the free sites, but at a much slower pace than you will with UAW or AMA. UAW and AMA will give you the most bang for the buck and help set your linkbuilding on the fast track to higher rankings.

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